The older he became, the more Bobby cherished the name Rice. When Donald Mofilitt, in the ninth grade, learned his real name and started calling him Rizzo, Bobby caught him behind the boathouse and beat him relentlessly. He was never called anything but Rice after that.
Bobby looked at his watch: seven o’clock. The team would be arriving at the gymnasium, laughing and going to Doc Blundell for their freshly laundered uniforms. Bobby could see his own uniform—tight-fitting golden pants and white jersey with the big, blue “14” on the front and back—laid out like a bullfighter’s suit of lights on the scarred wooden bench.
He could even smell the wonderful odor of the gym, a mixture of ancient sweat, strong liniment from Doc’s blue bottles, a whiff of after-shave lotion and the fresh-bread aroma of the newly laundered jerseys.
Bobby knew that his knees would have been shaking as he stood with the starting team facing Coach Blundell. The coach had a habit of talking directly to the starters and letting the rest of the team eavesdrop. He could hear himself being asked: “Rice, on the R-34 draw, what do you look for if Hokanson doesn’t move his fat ass quick enough to get you some running space?”
“Elliot Carlson on the left flank, Coach,” Bobby answered aloud, “and—” But he couldn’t go on. His throat wouldn’t produce the words his mind was feeding it. He sat there feeling choked and hopeless. He looked at his watch again and knew that the coach would be worried and wondering where he was. Starting players were never late.
Unable to stand the tension, Bobby jumped up and slammed the punching bag hanging in the corner with his right hand. He instinctively spared his passing arm. He felt the punch tingle all the way back to his shoulder. The slight pain felt good. And with that punch, Bobby made up his mind. He would play in the game tonight. To hell with his father. He could still make it if he hurried. And the team would win. He’d worry about facing his father tomorrow. Nothing he could do to him would matter after tonight.
Bobby leaped over to the bed, zipped open his bag and checked the contents. Then he slipped into his leather jacket and opened the window. He felt the sharp needles of the cool evening sting his face. It was a beautiful night for football.
It was a dozen feet from Bobby’s window to the ground, but the drainpipe was strong. Bobby knew that Pete and another of his father’s men were patrolling the house. He had to evade them.
He tied his old Boy Scout rope to the handle of his bag with a slip knot and carefully lowered the bag to the ground just past the dark window of the downstairs spare room. When the bag touched, Bobby flicked the rope and felt it fly free. He drew it up swiftly. Looking around the room for something sturdy, Bobby tied the rope to the leg of his bed and pulled the bed up against the wall under the window. Getting back up the drainpipe would be tough without the rope.
Bobby threw a leg over the windowsill, tested the pipe with half of his weight and found it did not give at all. He began to lower himself, hand over hand, sneaker-shod feet clamped to the pipe, down the side of the house, keeping as flat to the stuccoed wall as he could. The shadow of the house next door made the wall under his window a fathomless black.
Slowly, with an athlete’s control, the boy edged down the pipe and then jumped to the ground into a silent crouch. He tied the rope taut to a strut at the bottom of the drainpipe. He retrieved his bag from the flower bed.
Still crouching, Bobby tried to determine the safest way past his father’s sentries. He started to move toward the fence of the yard next door with his bag in hand when he saw a shadow pass the corner of the front of the house and heard a voice call: “Did you say something, Pete?”
“Naw,” said Pete, “I think it was somebody in the house.”
As the shadow withdrew, Bobby uncurled and stretched for the fence again. He switched his bag to his right hand. Then, with a measured step, Bobby gracefully vaulted over the fence, broke his fall with his right foot and crouched noiselessly to the ground, bag in hand.
Bobby was exposed for only a moment in the bright light of a near-full moon at the top of the fence before slithering back into the darkness. But it was long enough for Alec Hoerner, hidden in the recesses of a screenless porch across the street, to spot him.
Stiff, bored, cold and getting increasingly pissed off, Hoerner had turned his mind inward to other endless nights in Vietnam and on the West Side of Manhattan. Sometimes it seemed as though he had spent half his life in the dark waiting for something violent to happen. Keying himself up to the point where if nothing happened you made something happen. Anything. So long as it resolved the hard, aching knot of tension. Hoerner saw something move swiftly on the right periphery of his vision. Bobby Rice. Suddenly he wasn’t cold or bored. He was a highly trained hunting animal acting on his own. He was alive to the possibilities of the chase.
Alec sat still for a moment and waited for Bobby to appear again. When he didn’t see the boy, Hoerner knew that he’d come out on the side street and that it was time to move fast. This was his chance to strike. Across the street in the bright moonlight, he could see one of the thugs patrolling the front of the house. He knew there was at least one other.
Stepping from the side of the porch into a bed of lovingly planted dahlia bulbs, Hoerner fell flat on his stomach onto the rough concrete driveway and wriggled quickly into the safety of more shadow. Putting a thick tree between himself and Rizzo’s house, he set out in pursuit of Bobby Rice.
30
Injun was cruising slowly down Central Avenue drumming a rhythm on the steering wheel and humming the fill-in melody. On the seat beside him was a bag full of leak-proof containers of Chinese food—dinner for Pete, Ernie and himself. Bored and restless, Injun had volunteered to get the food. Rizzo said all right, but don’t screw around.
He wasn’t exactly screwing around, but Injun was driving very slowly in the curb-side lane watching the flow of kids heading for the football game at the municipal stadium. He’d been too small to play football himself, and he couldn’t see much in the game. Injun was giving special attention to three short-dressed pompon girls practicing a routine and singing as they jogged along in the early dark when he saw Bobby Rice. Bobby was on the other side of the street, moving at a half-trot toward the stadium, and a group of boys were running to keep up with him.
“Bobby,” one of them panted, “are you going to score some touchdowns tonight?”
“I hope so,” said Bobby, looking over his shoulder in hopes of spotting someone in a car who could drive him the rest of the way. He could feel his shirt clinging to his sweaty back under the leather jacket.
“You’re late,” another kid said, spurting ahead and turning around to run backward ahead of Bobby. “It’s only twenty min—” The boy caught his heel and fell, and Bobby had to shift to avoid stepping on him.
“I know,” said Bobby, not tired but worried. “I know.”
Nearly a block behind Bobby, Hoerner was having difficulty keeping up without attracting attention to himself. Hoerner knew he had to grab the kid before Bobby got to the stadium ahead or he might never get another chance at him. He figured that once he had Bobby, and Rizzo knew it, the pressure would come off Harry Caster in a hurry.
“Young bastard!” an old man with a heavily-laden string bag shouted at him after being jostled.
“Get laid,” Hoerner muttered, sidestepping to get around a clot of giggling young girls.
“What’s your hurry?” the boldest of them called to him.
Hoerner had just broken through a string of sidewalk-hogging boys too timid to do anything but mumble soft protests, when Injun braked the car sharply to halt across the street from Bobby Rice.
“Hey, Bobby,” he called out.
For a moment, Bobby thought it was a friend from school, and with a grateful grin he cut through a covey of admirers and ran toward the black car. Halfway across the street, he recognized the driver, saw that Injun was opening the door to get out, and Bobby’s smile turned into a grimace.
“No!
” Bobby cried and swiveled to get away from the car and Injun. But then Injun was out of the car and had hold of Bobby with his short but powerful arms. “Let go!” the boy shouted, trying to stiff-arm his way out of Injun’s grasp, but Injun held on and dragged him toward the car.
Still nearly half a block back, Hoerner saw Bobby run into the road toward the waiting car. “Damn!” he said, startling a chemistry teacher and his wife walking in front of him. Alec thought, I’ll lose him sure as hell if he gets into that car. He cut from the sidewalk into the street and began running.
Then he saw the little man from the car grab Bobby and instantly recognized him as one of the punks with Gino Speranza. Hoerner automatically drew his pistol and held it flat against his right thigh.
At nearly the same moment, while grappling with Bobby, Injun saw Hoerner over the boy’s shoulder, saw the flash of the gun as it slid back into darkness. He forgot Bobby, shoving him away with such force that the boy fell sprawling on the cobbled street and lay stunned for a moment. But then Bobby realized he was free, jumped to his feet and sprinted at full tilt toward the lights of the stadium. Injun scrambled back into his car.
Splitting his vision, Hoerner saw the punk go back into the car, but most of his attention was on the shifting back of Bobby Rice as he raced toward the sanctuary ahead. Catching him was out of the question, Hoerner knew, especially after he had been spotted by Rizzo’s man. He knew that within seconds he would have to deal with that danger. But right now he could concentrate only on the fact that he had either to let Bobby go or bring him down. Hoerner made a blind, instinctive decision.
Hoerner dropped to his left knee and brought his gun-carrying arm in front of his body like a short lance. Grasping his right wrist, he aligned the sight of the pistol with Bobby’s shifting back and squeezed the trigger at half-second intervals.
The first bullet hit Bobby on stride and seemed to speed him up rather than slow him. But a split second later his regular gait turned wobbly like that of an exhausted runner. The second bullet increased the staggering and started his fall to the rough-cobbled pavement. The third shot caught Bobby high on the shoulder as he went down, accelerating his plunge and sending him scudding across the cobblestones on his smooth cheek until he shuddered to a stop with his eyes wide open, not in pain but in disappointment.
Still able to move, Bobby threw his right hand out toward the stadium. “Coach!” he cried through a froth of blood. Then Bobby Rice died with the tall arc lights of the stadium reflected in his wide-staring eyes.
When he heard the first shot, Injun was already back in the car about to wheel it around and go after Bobby. But at the sight of Hoerner’s crouching figure, the boy was forgotten. Jabbing the starter button, Injun pushed the gear shift into low and floored the accelerator. As the car peeled out, he flicked the car lights out.
Hoerner noted with clinical satisfaction that he had been right to drop the third shot a shade. He frowned as he saw the fourth shot miss the boy and spark as it shattered against a cobblestone. He didn’t notice a girl farther down the street crumple as a fragment severed her spinal cord.
He thought no more of the boy as he began to recover from his shooting position. Hoerner’s senses were raw to the danger of his exposed situation in the middle of a well-lighted street. He kept his pistol leveled, but so far all attention was on Bobby’s body. Someone urged someone else to call an ambulance, and several boys ran out into the street to kneel over the boy.
“It’s Bobby Rice,” a stunted freshman said in wonder. “He’s been hurt.”
Hoerner was nearly erect and turning to deal with the menace of Injun, but he wasn’t quick enough. A speeding black object became a car, abruptly veering toward him, and Alec raised his pistol to aim.
The hammer was not quite all the way back when the left fender hit Hoerner full on and drove him backward off his feet. The gun flew from his out-flung arm, spun brightly in the air and skidded to a stop next to the curb.
With a grunt of pain, Hoerner felt his pelvis crack and tried to cling to the front of the car as his feet were swept from under him. But as the pelvis bones grated under the assault of the car, a thin, sharp knife shot through his body. With a shrill moan, Hoerner tried to push off the smooth black fender like a gored matador high on the horn of a bull.
He needn’t have bothered. For as Injun fought to get the car back on the other side of the street, Hoerner, still conscious, was hurled backward under the front of an oncoming bus. The crunch as a big wheel passed over his chest brought welcome blackness from the searing pain that rode him to the ground. The back wheel, unchecked by the frightened bus driver, also passed over his body, but the jolt bothered the passengers more than it did Alec Hoerner.
Cutting off a terrified boy in an MG, Injun regained the right side of the street and floored the accelerator again. Switching the lights back on, he jumped a red light and at the next corner braked into a controlled slide which shot the car into a narrow side street.
Rizzo was sitting in the living room trying to figure out his next move when he heard the banging on the door.
“I’ll get it,” he told Angie who was sitting under the lamp knitting a sweater. As Rizzo opened the door, Injun nearly hit him as he lowered his fist. “What do you want?” Rizzo demanded.
“It’s your boy,” Injun gasped. “He’s been shot. Down near the stadium.”
“You’re crazy,” Rizzo said. “Bobby’s in his room.” But he knew Injun was telling the truth. Rizzo turned his head and saw his wife standing in the doorway to the living room. “Angie,” he said, pushing his arm toward the stairs leading to their son’s room, “Bobby…”
“You’d better go, Carlo,” Angie said. Her white face was prepared for the worst.
“I’ll be right back,” Rizzo told her. Pushing Injun out of the door ahead of him, he strode toward his car at the curb. “You guys stay with this house,” he told Pete and Ernie without pausing. “If anything goes wrong, I’ll have your balls.” He said to Injun: “You come with me,” and ran to the car.
Angie Rizzo listened as the car roared down the street. Then she turned and walked up the stairs to the hall in front of Bobby’s room. Biting her lip, she first tried the door and found it locked. Then she knocked feebly and called: “Bobby? Bobby? Are you there, Bobby?” There was no answer, and she’d expected none. She lowered her arm and stood looking at the door.
Just then the telephone rang. Absentmindedly, Angie lifted the upstairs extension from its cradle on the hall table.
“Hello?” she said automatically.
“It’s me—Ruby, Mrs. Rice. I’m down in Greenwich Village. Caster and the girl are still wandering around. I wanted to ask Mr. Rice what I should do next.”
Angie responded without a pause. “Kill them, Ruby. Kill them both.”
“Mrs. Rice?” Ruby said in confusion. “Did you—”
“I said kill them both. Ruby,” Angie said with force. “Hit them. Burn them.” She used the slang awkwardly. “I want them dead.” She put down the telephone.
“Okay, Mrs. Rice,” Ruby said into the dead telephone. He looked across the square to the brightly lit sidewalk cafe where Harry and Sandra were sitting.
31
Hours of wandering and telephoning had passed, and Harry and Sandra sat wearily at a small round plastic table surrounded by tourists.
“Just to cheer us up,” Sandra said, stirring her cooling coffee for the fifth time, “why don’t you try to call your brother again?”
“Again?”
“Yes, and if he’s not there this time, we’ll commit suicide by jumping off a high curb.”
Harry fished a dime from his pocket and dialed Mickey’s number again on a telephone hanging next to the scarred restroom door. He didn’t hope for anything better than the same old recorded message, but to Harry’s surprise he heard the rasping tones of a busy signal. “Hey,” he called to Sandra, “you’re not going to believe this, but somebody seems to be at Mickey’s pl
ace. The line is busy.”
“Hurrah,” said Sandra flatly.
Across the square in the shadow of two power poles, Ruby looked anxiously at the couple in the glassed-in enclosure of the restaurant and gripped the carved handle of a .32 automatic in his coat pocket. The safety lock of the pistol was firmly on and had been checked and rechecked a dozen times in the last half hour. The square was busy with casual strollers, and Ruby dared not chance shooting. So he watched and worried.
Harry dialed again. This time the monotonous ring sounded and then was broken and a voice answered.
“Hello?” said a woman warily, and Harry recognized the voice.
“Alison?” he said. “It’s Harry—Harry Caster. Is my brother there?”
“Hello, Harry,” she said. “No, he’s not here right now. I’m expecting him any second, but—”
“I’ve got to see him,” Harry said. “Everything has gone wrong.”
“Things are falling apart here a bit, too,” the secretary said, “but okay, come over and take your chances. But I’m not guaranteeing anything. I’ve got to go now, g’bye.” She hung up the telephone.
“What did he say?” Sandra asked when Harry came back to the table.
“He’s not there,” Harry said, “but his secretary said to come and Mickey will probably be there soon.”
“Let’s go, then,” Sandra said. Harry paid the bill, and they walked out onto the cold sidewalk.
A yellow cab appeared like a shark in clear water, and Harry jammed two fingers into his mouth and let blast a piercing whistle. The taxi swerved to a stop, and they climbed in.
The Triple Shot Box (Goodey's Last Stand, Not Sleeping Just Dead & Fighting Back): Three Gritty Crime Novels Page 58